A pot of caviar? A shiny new car? A beautiful new suit? No, give me log-chopping any time

By Adam Nicolson

12:01AM GMT 03 Jan 2004

An annual ritual: the midwinter wooding. Every year, we find a tree that has blown down, slice it up with a chainsaw, split the logs and stack them in the woodshed. It is the most primitive thing I do all year, and without doubt the most satisfying.

The split wood is no good for the fire until it has waited in its stack for at least one year, preferably two. At the moment, we are just burning the last of the sycamore we cut at the end of 2001. It is, at last, in perfect condition, so dry that it feels like balsa, so burnable that you can very nearly light a log with a match, or at least with a single rolled-up page of a newspaper.

Columnists' friendly faces stare out at me from the licking flames. But this is the end of that sycamore and we shall soon have to turn to the larch that was last winter's victim. It is nothing like as dry yet, still spitty in the fire, with a tendency to go out unless you nurture it. Newspaper empires will need to be devoted to its combustion.

This year, the gales on Wednesday night delivered another tree on cue. Our house is on the shores of the Sound of Mull, facing south, within 50 yards of the beach, and the screaming south-easterlies on New Year's evening came belting out of the dark at us like freight trains. I knew that trees would be falling outside.

New Year's Day revealed the damage: half of a giant 19th-century sycamore had been cleaved from its trunk and lay smashed and tattered across the hillside. There was at least two years' firewood in that, but it was in an awkward place and would have to wait. Two other much smaller sycamores had been broken off at head height, next to the house. They were the ones.

As I am not to be trusted with a chainsaw, having once dropped a tree on my head, from where it continued on downwards, pinning both my chainsaw and very nearly me beneath it, Andrew Wallace, an old friend of mine, did the cutting, neatly producing one fire-sized log after another. I took them into our yard and started the splitting.

They must have had splitting axes in the Stone Age: the head is scarcely more than a slightly pointed hammer. The length of the shaft allows you to bring its weight down on to the log at speed and the wood splits not because it has been cut, but because it has been hit hard along a narrow line.

The logs open like apples, there is a sudden release of tannins into the air as the fibres cleave and an extraordinary satisfaction fills the axeman.

Why? Partly it is smugness. Cutting wood for use in a year's or even two years' time induces Swiss levels of self-congratulation.

Even if my stack nowhere near approaches the Lego-style precision of your average Swiss stack, I can still feel marvellously Continental at these moments, the mental equivalent of a neatly buttoned Loden jacket that says: "I'm all right, Jack; I'm not sure you're getting on quite as well as I am."

But there is more to it than that. I love the sheer physicality, the throwing of the wood into the back of the Land-Rover, the rhythmic work of swinging the axe for a morning, the noise of the wood opening, like the solid, multiple tearing of a sheet of paper, the sheer engagement with the physical world that it represents. How, in the end, can pushing the boost button on the central heating compare?

Not, of course, that I don't love central heating. If central heating were invented tomorrow, I would install it. So this log-chopping is pure luxury, that odd modern phenomenon of the luxury posing as the primitive.

So this comes down to a choice of luxuries: if you asked me whether I would prefer a pot of caviar; a beautiful new suit; a marvellous new car; or the chance to spend two days at the beginning of each year wooding with Andrew and his chainsaw, and me with my axe, I would choose the wooding every time.

The splitting is a solitary man's activity. Woodmen have always been thought slightly odd, spending far too much time on their own, engaged in repetitive, simple work, endlessly turning over thoughts in their heads.

Why is wooding so good? I kept asking myself all morning. The answer has to be that it is not deceptive or deceitful. It isn't done for show. There is nothing hidden. It doesn't put you in line for a knighthood. It simply is what it is. It makes a clean, useful and pleasing product, which will in time make a good fire. It cures, for a moment or two, the alienation from things.

No one talks about alienation now, at least in the way they used to 20 or 30 years ago. Perhaps that talk was just a transitional phase, as the deep alienation of modernity was taking hold and people could still remember what it was like to be in touch with the actual and the physical.

Maybe now we are so alienated, so virtual and so electronic, floating so free of a tangible life, that we no longer even notice that we are. If it were me - and I am not sure if this is too Colonel Blimpish - I would encourage every university course to include aspects of wooding, or if not, of boat-handling, lobster-potting, or any other de-alienating activity.

The Government should employ Ray Mears (why hasn't he been knighted yet?) as its non-alienation adviser for higher education.

Wouldn't life be richer for everyone if they knew the sound and sweet-bitter smell of a log splitting at their feet?